Brazilians marked the first anniversary of the murder of Rio councillor Marielle Franco on Thursday with flowers, candles and protest banners, just days after the arrest of two police officers suspected of killing her.

Dozens of people gathered at dawn at the crossroads where she was killed in the center of Rio. Many sang songs and hung up posters demanding answers about her murder.

“Marielle’s murder for us, black women of this country, represents a profound process of resuming our path, of rescuing our identity and of resisting, because we know that the policies of femicide, of genocide of black youth, is a common practice,” said actress Silvia de Mendonca who took part in the event.

The steps outside Rio’s municipal building where she worked were adorned with sunflowers in Franco’s honor, and several women dressed in white and walking on stilts carried a banner with the legend “Marielle Giant”.

A memorial mass was celebrated in Rio’s landmark Candelaria church attended by her parents, family and friends.

In the capital Brasilia, a group of women symbolically renamed one of the city’s bridges the “Marielle Franco Bridge” instead of the Artur Costa e Silva bridge, named after a dictatorship-era president.